United States Finally Gets Serious About Wind Power

“…Massachusetts is looking to capitalize on wind technology, and aims to add 1,600 megawatts of electricity by 2027. That would be enough to power a third of all residential homes in the state.

On Wednesday, that effort took a major step forward as the State of Massachusetts, after holding an auction, selected a group made up of a Danish investment firm and a Spanish utility to erect giant turbines on the ocean bottom, beginning about 15 miles off Martha’s Vineyard. This initial project will generate 800 megawatts of electricity, roughly enough to power a half a million homes. At the same time, Rhode Island announced it would award a 400-megawatt offshore wind project to another bidder in the auction.

The groups must now work out the details of their contracts with the states’ utilities.

‘We see this not just as a project but as the beginning of an industry,’ Lars Thaaning Pedersen, the chief executive of Vineyard Wind, which was awarded the Massachusetts contract, said in an interview.

Offshore wind farms have increasingly become mainstream sources of power in Northern Europe, and are fast becoming among the cheapest sources of electricity in countries like Britain and Germany. Those power sources in those two countries already account for more than 12 gigawatts of electricity generation capacity.

But the United States has largely not followed that lead, with just one relatively small offshore wind farm built off the coast of Rhode Island. Currently, the entire country’s offshore wind capacity is just 30 megawatts.

‘We know in light of Northern Europe’s experience with offshore wind that many U.S. ports will benefit from the arrival of the industry here,’ Jon Mitchell, the New Bedford mayor, said.from offshore operators. ‘As long as there are boats that will be here,’ he said, ‘it is business for us.’…”

Full article: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/business/energy-environment/offshore-wind-massachusetts.html

About Lloyd Kahn

Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include Shelter, Shelter II (1978), Home Work (2004), Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008), Tiny Homes (2012), and Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:

2 Responses to United States Finally Gets Serious About Wind Power

ok, so maybe you all will throw rotten eggs at me…–But, am not a fan. —ugly protuberance on the landscape—high pitched noises from operation which greatly bother many folks and animals—many birds die hitting them—and more

And then…–they use scads of rare earth metals which are mined under abhorrent/slave like conditions, often by children((Estimates of the exact amount of rare earth minerals in wind turbines vary, but in any case the numbers are staggering. According to the Bulletin of Atomic Sciences, a 2 megawatt (MW) wind turbine contains about 800 pounds of neodymium and 130 pounds of dysprosium"-etc etc